![]() (Sample from Alice: “I suppose you think this is all extremely rudimentary and maybe even that I’m un-dialectical. ![]() Interspersing the narrative are long, wordy emails exchanged between Alice and Eileen. The friendship between the two women is unconventionally told. (She also spends a lot of time Googling her ex-boyfriend.) These four people, all approaching 30, are, to one or another degree, lost: too successful, not successful enough, carrying various wounds of their childhoods and, in spite of endlessly analysing their own reactions to things, unable to identify what they want. It features a set of recognisably Roonian characters: Alice, a successful writer, is dating Felix, who works in a warehouse her best friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine, is obsessed with Simon, a childhood friend who works in politics. Like the other two novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You is set in Ireland, where Rooney grew up and still lives. I point out she thanks him in the book’s acknowledgments. “How do you know I’m married?” she says, taken aback when I mention John, her husband, a maths teacher with whom she’s been since college. In fact, over the course of our two conversations, by Zoom and by email – in which we will discuss her journey from champion teenage debater to novelist, whether she’s sufficiently working class to be allowed to use the word “Marxist” and the new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You – Rooney is nothing but obliging, though her sensitivities to intrusion are occasionally triggered to amusing effect. Rooney is assumed to be difficult in the vein of her characters – a spiky, awkward, intellectual woman who, as Alice, the heroine of her new novel, says of herself, goes around “accusing everyone of having the wrong opinions”. It all seems a lot to hang on the shoulders of a very slight young woman, hair grown long during the pandemic so that it falls in sheets on either side of her face. ![]() ![]() Nonetheless, that is how they are perceived. “I don’t think of my novels as ‘millennial novels’ any more than I think of them as ‘female novels’,” Rooney says. More trenchantly, it became the sort of talismanic novel made to represent an entire generation’s coming of age. Normal People sold a million copies and was turned into a megahit TV show starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. Rooney’s ability to unpack a thought or feeling without forfeiting economy is one of the great strengths of her writing.) (Early on in Conversations With Friends, Frances, the heroine, sleeps with Nick, a married man, and taking the bus home afterwards, sits at the back near the window, where “the sun bore down on my face like a drill and the cloth of the seat felt sensationally tactile against my bare skin”. They were erudite and self-assured, written with a dry, flat affect that was often very funny, and contained the kinds of fleeting, well-wrought descriptions that infused every scene with a casual virtuosity. The books featured characters in late adolescence and early adulthood struggling through first relationships while starting to organise their thoughts about the world. Her first two novels – Conversations With Friends and Normal People – were published in quick succession to the sort of acclaim that put Rooney in a category of exposure more consistent with actors than novelists. There are some good reasons for the 30-year-old’s reticence.
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